A US call for Security Council scrutiny of fraud and waste in UN peacekeeping has triggered a bitter fight with nonaligned nations that could set back delicate talks on key overall reforms.

US Ambassador John Bolton, the Security Council president for February, scheduled a meeting of the 15-member council next Wednesday on "waste, fraud and abuse" in procurement in UN peacekeeping operations.

The meeting is to focus on an audit report by the UN Office for Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) on irregularities in peacekeeping procurement that probably caused tens of millions of dollars in losses.

But the report has touched a bitter row between the Security Council and the General Assembly as to who should tackle the issue.

The G77 group of developing countries plus China says the 191-member General Assembly commissioned the OIOS report and should have the lead oversight role.

"This issue belongs to the General Assembly. It is the members of the G77 that asked for this report that now 15 countries want to discuss by themselves,"​

said South Africa's UN envoy Dumisani Kumalo, the chairman of the G77, which groups 132 nations.

But Bolton didn't quite see it that way.

"I don't think we are trying to take over the work of the General Assembly at all," he noted.

"The two public meetings that we will have next week on procurement, waste, fraud and abuse in peacekeeping operations and on sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations are matters where I think both the General Assembly and the Security Council have legitimate equity."​

The G77 early this month also criticized UN under-secretary-general for management, Christopher Burnham, for briefing the media on the OIOS report last month even before the document was brought to the attention of the General Assembly.

Burnham, a US national, was appointed to his post last year to push through a sweeping reform of UN management practices.

The criticism led US congressmen Henry Hyde and Tom Lantos to write a letter to Kumalo accusing the G77 of trying to block UN chief Kofi Annan's efforts to clean house in the wake of a massive bribery scandal in the UN procurement department.

"Apparently the Group of 77 and China would rather keep citizens of the world in the dark about the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been stolen from them by corrupt UN officials and companies contracting with them," the two congressmen said in the letter.​

"There is consternation (among nonaligned nations) and perhaps a sense of injury at the tone and the substance of the letter."

"There has been for several years now a tension and concern among a large number of members of the General Assembly at the encroachment of the Security Council," he said.

"There are efforts to revitalize the General Assembly. You cannot revitalize the General Assembly if the Security Council keeps on taking issues from the General Assembly which are supposed to be (in) its own mandate."

Kumalo slammed the letter from the US lawmakers as "very unfortunate, very threatening" and full of "misinformation."

"We will set the record straight in a substantive way but clearly we will not be responding to the US Congress," he said.​

The Swedish president of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson, for his part said he shared "the concern that we must preserve the integrity of the General Assembly."

Bolton has been aggressively pushing for a sweeping overhaul of UN management practices in the wake of the Iraq oil-for-food scandal and the UN procurement fraud case.

"It is particularly important for the United States which pays 27 percent of the cost of (UN) peacekeeping operations to make sure they are run efficiently and up to the highest standards," he told reporters Friday.​

But some diplomats warned about the possible fallout from the rising tension between the powerful Security Council, which includes the major UN contributors, and the large bloc of developing countries in the General Assembly.

The two sides are locked in hard-nosed negotiations over the establishment of a new Human Rights Council to replace the current discredited Human Rights Commission.

And some developing nations are unhappy about some aspects of the UN management reforms which they see as an attempt to curb the powers and prerogatives of the General Assembly.

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